[tronium]

Telehack changed my life, quite significantly.

I was homeschooled in a heavily locked down home. Internet was effectively not allowed, and when used, only whitelisted sites permitted. Everything was tracked.

Our home work/life was strenuous. Both parents holding advanced degrees and living on a hobby farm led to ~10h a day of homework, and another ~3-4h per day of taking care of the place. Very little room for socializing/free time, and even when there was, it would usually be filled with more homework/chores.

I was around 13 the time (this would be 2010), and I'd discovered the Terminal app on the Macs we used. Toying around with it when nobody was in the room had led to some discoveries. I'd spend hours looking through the file system, when I discovered "man" and started reading the manuals for them.

This led me down the rabbit hole of learning everything I could about the world inside the command prompt, and even opening up telnet ports on other macs throughout the house and connecting to them.

Eventually, (and unfortunately I cannot remember how), I discovered that I could connect to Telehack, a BBS with real other people on it, and our internet tracking software didn't discover it.

Whenever I had any longer than a minute alone, I'd connect and talk with the people there. I learned things about the old internet, got sent places I could FTP to download books (The Cuckoo's Egg being one of them), found friends and joined their "ssh server" (where we set up custom ways of more live-chat), and I learned basic programming in Bash, Python, Ruby, and other languages. I always had to disconnect (Apple+Q) as soon as I heard footsteps.

Now I'm double the age I was then (26) and have worked full-time as a software engineer for 4 years.

Telehack changed how I talked with people, learned, and my entire career path. Thx <3

[aeonik]

How did you figure out how to navigate the filesystem in the first place? Or use the terminal app to get to the man pages?

I remember opening up my first IDE when I was about 14 and becoming overwhelmed with my complete lack of knowledge about coding. Looking at the blank text file was like staring into a bottomless pit of nothingness.

I learned how to read from the terminal though, so I knew commands like `cd` and `dir` before I even knew how to read.

I'm unsure how someone just figures out the terminal without a guide.

[phatskat]

Was back on Windows 3.1/DOS, it was mostly trial and error. Trying different commands because my Doom executable stopped working, then learning DIR etc. learning about /? or /help. Eventually understanding more and more bits - definitely kludging my way through it, occasionally finding books at the library on programming that were largely useless but you’d see some commands here and there that you could glean information from.

Eventually got Linux and that opened up a lot for me for learning. I spent a ton of time on the command line as it felt easier to navigate and do what I wanted to achieve. Eventually that led to building kernels, debugging failed builds, etc.

I don’t remember where, but somehow I got a copy of SoftIce and figured out breakpoints and hex editing enough to “crack” my copy of LJpegViewer (I had a key on a floppy somewhere, but I lost it).

All of these little excursions led to me slowly learning more. My first IDE was notepad.exe. My next was briefly one of the slightly fancier editors with HTML highlighting. Then I found pico, and eventually vim, and that’s been my daily for about 13 years now.

A lot of my childhood was doing things I didn’t understand on my computer, often breaking things, and learning to fix them. Poking at the registry with reckless abandon or telnetting cross country because modem’s manual had a list of BBS’s, and grabbing scrap computers from my middle school’s dumpsters.

A fascination with tinkering and being able to be ok if I had to wipe my hard drive.

[tronium]

I went through the applications folder on my mac and opened every single one up to figure out what they did. That's how I learned to navigate the file system and discovered the Terminal app.

Read a "Linux for Dummies" at the library for a few minutes, that got me some basic commands. I would spend hours using "cd" and "ls" to look at files, and then I would try to run them... 99% of the time nothing would happen. When I made it to /bin, I discovered a lot of things I could run.

You have to put yourself in the shoes of a 13 year old with no social media, no internet, friends he sees for a few hours 1-2x per week, and a fairly limitless amount of homework/chores to do. Whenever people weren't watching, I'd do anything to not be working on homework at the computer. That meant hundreds of hours to mess around.

[aeonik]

Yes, I have been in similar situations, but I did have access to some Myspace hacker forums, and some gaming friends that were into this stuff to help guide me when I got stuck. At least later on.

I also got a few books at around 13... but your experience enumerating everything without a guide entirely, for so long, is quite something.